Pimmich – A Smart DIY Photo Frame Powered by Raspberry Pi

Pimmich was born from a simple frustration.

Most commercial smart photo frames require a cloud account, an internet connection, and often upload personal photos to external servers. They are easy to use, but offer very little control, limited customization, and raise privacy concerns.

As a maker and Raspberry Pi enthusiast, I wanted a different approach.

The idea behind Pimmich was to build a smart photo frame that runs entirely locally, without any cloud dependency, while remaining simple to install and pleasant to use on a daily basis.

Pimmich is built around a Raspberry Pi and designed to work as a standalone device. All photos are stored locally, processed locally, and displayed locally. Even without an internet connection, the frame continues to work perfectly.

The project focuses on reliability and visual quality. Photos are automatically prepared to match the screen resolution, EXIF orientation is corrected, and portrait images are displayed with a blurred background to preserve the original aspect ratio.

A web-based interface allows easy configuration from any device on the same network. From this interface, you can import photos from a USB drive, manage Wi-Fi, preview the slideshow live, apply photo filters, and control display schedules to turn the screen off automatically when not needed.

Pimmich is also designed as a modular and extensible project. New features can be added easily, making it a great base for experimentation and customization. Over time, features such as weather display, tide information, and advanced photo management have been integrated.

This project is ideal for creating a personal photo frame for your home, offering a meaningful DIY gift, or building a customizable display for an office, workshop, or public space.

Pimmich is fully open-source and made for makers who value privacy, control, and simplicity.

Features

· 📸 Fullscreen photo slideshow

· 🖥️ Optimized for Raspberry Pi

· 🌐 Web-based configuration interface

· 📁 Local photo storage (no cloud)

· 🔄 Automatic photo preparation (resize, orientation, blur background)

· ⏰ Scheduled display on/off (screen sleep outside active hours)

· 📡 Wi-Fi configuration from the web interface

· 🖼️ Live slideshow preview

· 🎨 Photo filters (Black & White, Sepia, Vignette)

· 🌦️ Weather & tide information (optional)

· 🔌 USB photo import with real-time progress

· 🔐 Simple authentication for the admin interface

· 🧩 Modular & extensible architecture

🔹 Hardware Required

• Raspberry Pi (recommended: Raspberry Pi 3, 4 or 5)
• MicroSD card (16 GB or more)
• HDMI display (any size)
• Power supply for Raspberry Pi

Optional:

• USB flash drive (for photo import)
• Frame or enclosure (3D printed or DIY)

🔹 Software Used

• Raspberry Pi OS 64 bits Bookworm Legacy
• Python 3
• Flask (web interface)
• Pygame (fullscreen slideshow)
• Tailwind CSS (UI styling)
• Pillow (image processing)

🔹 How It Works

Photos are stored locally on the Raspberry Pi

A preparation script:

• Fixes EXIF orientation
• Resizes images to screen resolution
• Adds blurred backgrounds for portrait photos

The slideshow runs fullscreen using Pygame

A web interface allows you to:

• Configure settings
• Import photos from USB
• Control Wi-Fi
• Preview the slideshow live

Outside configured hours, the screen turns off automatically to save power

Pimmich is an open-source project and the community is growing.

If you want to follow the project, ask questions, share ideas or contribute, you can join the Discord server:

Discord
https://discord.gg/7zEpeMqR

You can also find documentation, news and project updates on the official Pimmich website:

Website
www.pimmich.ovh

Feedback, contributions and feature ideas are always welcome.